OpEd News: December 13, 2011

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While the Recorder may not agree with everything that OpEdNews writers have to say, we find it a refreshing change from what you will find in the Main Stream Media (MSM). I started to highlight those articles I deemed most crucial to read, however, every article here is worth your attention. From constitutional amendments to police abuse of a peaceful protester, these writers give us a look at what is wrong with America today.

Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises the drones, said Predators are flown “in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement and emergency responders in times of crisis.”

The book, Rosslyn: Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail by Tim Wallace Murphy & Marilyn Hopkins suggests that Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland hides the proof laid there by the Knights Templar that indeed a blood line from Jesus exists to this day. IS THE MORMON CHURCH BANKING ON THAT BEING MITT ROMNEY?

Obama’s speech was a welcome tonic, an indication of a new direction that might be taken. So who deserves credit for nudging the president to change his focus and tone? Occupy Wall Street. The president’s speech–which might be viewed as the opening salvo of the presidential race–was defined by OWS. Growth, fairness, and opportunity have replaced deficit reduction as the central theme of American politics.

New, previously suppressed testimony by Dr. Jonathon Dranov further discredits the grand jury report that was uncritically used by the news media and, then, the incited mob pressure Penn State’s board of trustees to throw Joe Paterno under the bus.

Occupy is at it again. Tomorrow morning, Monday 12/12, Occupy will shut down All West Coast ports from Seattle to San Diego. Houston Occupy has indicated that they will join in with solidarity and shut down the Port of Houston.

According to first-hand accounts by several sources in Jordan, during the last few hours foreign military groups, estimated at hundreds of individuals, are spreading near the Jordanian and Syrian border. Another report received from our source in Amman identified an additional US-NATO Command Center in “al-Houshah,’ a village near Mafraq.

Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space per new directives, a senior Pakistani official told NBC News on Saturday. According to the new Pakistani defense policy, “Any object entering into our air space, including U.S. drones, will be treated as hostile and be shot down,” a senior Pakistani military official told NBC News.

Change is not going to happen by external means. It can only happen when we change. Kymatica is a film hat makes this perfectly clear and is easy enough to get to. Just a tap on the link and you may watch this very important film

If you and your family store up lots of food, will you be identified as “potential terrorists” by law enforcement authorities? That sounds like an insane question, but sadly it has gotten to the point where “preparing for the worst” has become a “suspicious activity”.

In the last 24 hours, a giant battle has taken place at the gates of Washington, and the Israel lobby has lost. Former AIPAC operative Josh Block’s attempt to crush critics of Israel inside the Democratic Party has failed miserably. Block has issued an apology for calling those writers “anti-Semites,” and Block’s own business partner, former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis, has categorically rejected Block’s views.

Activist and journalist Victoria Law is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. In this interview, Law builds upon her earlier prison abolitionist critique by discussing practical alternatives for effectively confronting gender violence without using the prison system. She cites many success stories where women, not wanting to work with the police, instead collectively organized in an…

Lots of changes are happening inside Iran , the country is ready to explode . Western governments are becoming more active in their work against the Islamic Republic. the events of next year would be detremintal in future of the countrey , would the clergy loosen up the oppression of people and risk a serious uprising or become more beligerant towards western powers and risk , more difficult days. if one looks at the history of last thirty years one can easyly see that they are more scared of Iranians than forigners

So far, all candidates have declined Trump’s invitation, except for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich who committed to the event. “We were the first to say we wouldn’t do it. I got attacked by Mr. Trump and we attacked him back. I simply said to him, ‘If Trump had any cojones, you would be in this race and not trying to manipulate it from the sideline,'” Huntsman told a packed auditorium.

He is a veteran candidate, with an isolationist and libertarian agenda perhaps more suited to a bygone era. But Ron Paul, one of the fringe Republicans, might just be capable of producing a surprise upset in the first of the Republican primary elections in Iowa, thanks to support from a unlikely quarter — the young.

These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it’s organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we’ve seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you’re trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network connectivity when you can’t rely on your cellular or landline Internet connections

“Dressed in a black flak jacket with “United Nations” stamped across his chest, Mr. Ban met with leaders from Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, a weak, divided and thoroughly unpopular entity that the UN has been trying to prop up.” Ban Ki-moon is happy to describe the case of UN war in his homeland in the same glowing terms he describes UN armed intervention in Somalia to prevent an unacceptable Somali government.

Most citizens appear to be undereducated or misinformed about what their citizenship and professional responsibilities are to the rest of society. It is for this reason that our country now faces the greatest challenge it has ever faced — the permanent loss of the Constitution and the sovereignty of its citizens.

Income inequality in the U.S. is currently the highest its been since the 1920s, with the 400 richest Americans (who are all billionaires) having as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. And as it turns out, just one wealthy family has managed to amass a fortune equal to that of the combined net worth of the bottom 30 percent of Americans — the Waltons, heirs to the WalMart fortune, as Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, found:

On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in

The Occupy London Stock Exchange camp is now 59 days old – the same age as the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park was when it was taken down. The survival of the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral owes something to the Americans in the UK who have been among its keenest supporters.

The problem with children working is that they are easily manipulated and if you put them to work only part-time, employers don’t have to pay for health insurance and other benefits that full-time adult workers get. Also, once children grow up, why would businesses hire them when they can just put the next generation of children to work?

cording to the Associated Press, thousands of families across the Northeast are preparing to have one of the worst winters ever, because of a ice cold combination: rising fuel prices and government cuts. Congress is considering cutting $1 billion out of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Head of the Iranian Judiciary High Council for Human Rights says the violation of Iran’s airspace by an American spy drone is a blatant example of rights violation and legal action will be taken against the US. “Interfering in [internal] affairs of other countries is a dark habit of the US and [other] Western countries, and we (Iran) oppose all forms of intervention in the affairs of Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria and other countries,” he said.

The U.S. government prides itself on standing up for freedom of speech around the world, but when it comes to longtime ally Thailand and its revered monarch, Washington treads carefully – even when an American citizen is thrown in jail. Thailand on Thursday sent American Joe Gordon, 55, to prison for two and a half years for defaming the country’s royal family after he translated excerpts of a banned biography of Thailand’s king and published them online.

Asked about prospects for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, Ehud Barak said he still believed that it was “time for urgent, coherent, paralyzing” punitive steps targeting Iranian oil trade and its central bank. Barak also predicted that Syria’s ruling Assad family could fall within weeks and that this would be a “blessing” for the Middle East.

Europe is now the new AIG. European banks are buying massive amounts of credit default swaps (CDS’s) on the sovereign debt of their own countries. Put simply, European banks, in order to generate modest cash flow to plug large capital shortfall holes, have been selling trillions of dollars of CDS’s that can’t ever be paid. It was precisely this behavior that destroyed AIG when the illusion of the credit bubble burst.

The world is on track for a comprehensive global treaty on climate change for the first time after agreement was reached at talks in Durban, South Africa in the early hours of Sunday morning. Negotiators agreed to start work on a new climate deal that would have legal force and, crucially, require both developed and developing countries to cut their carbon emissions. The terms now need to be agreed by 2015 and come into effect from 2020.

The last U.S. cargo planes were loaded and took off Sunday from the Shamsi Air Base after the Pakistan government ordered the United States to vacate the base by a Dec. 11 deadline. “Last flight carrying left over US Personnel and Equipment departed Shamsi Base today and the Base has been completely vacated. The control of the Base has been taken over by the Army,” the Pakistan Army said in a statement. After a Nov. 26 NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, Pakistan immediately shut down NATO supply routes and demanded the U.S. vacate Shamsi Base, which had been used by American forces, including the CIA, for operations to attack militants linked to al-Qaida, the Taliban and Pakistan’s home-grown Haqqani network. Relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained since the deadly drone attack. Some observers say it’s the worst its ever been.

Hear the one about the Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia that nobody noticed? In the case of the mother of all petro-allies, Saudi Arabia, however, protests have been met with near silence by the media and no expressions of sympathy for the dissenters by Western governments.

Tensions are rising rapidly in the region. Britain has ordered all the Iranian diplomatic staff to leave UK within 48 hours. Iran is also taking a tough and dignified line. US and NATO have also declared a war on Pakistan and there is a great possibility that more hostilities may break out between Pakistan and western crusaders.

Gingrich would drag judges before Congress “to explain their constitutional reasoning” in some decisions “and to hear a proper Congressional constitutional interpretation.” Or he would simply ignore court decisions. His ideas would replace the rule of law with a reign of ideology.

[43] Evolution Securities Warns Of “Total Carnage And Meltdown” As European Bank Sales Of CDS On European Sovereign Debt Soar: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ql1AfitiuGkVjahtiUWDuBlJ0mvkrVJL